From Pietro Maspero’s New Exchange Coffee Salon to the Hotel Monteleone and the city’s earliest groceries, Italians and Italian Americans were central to the early infrastructure of Nola. Italian American cuisine and a host of cultural traditions also permeate the city and its mythos. Just consider the culinary specialty “muffaletta”--it encapsulates how Nola Italians, from cooks to jazz artists, importers, builders, and artisans, are woven into the fabric of the city’s (and broader region’s) daily life and culture.
The inverse of this hyper-visible cultural saturation is a complex world of submerged politics and power. Maspero’s Coffee Salon was notorious in its time for backroom trade of kidnapped and enslaved people. The famed St. Joseph Parade plays second or third fiddle to St. Patrick’s Day and the Mardi Gras Indians’ Super Sunday celebration. This panel celebrates examples of NOL’italiano--the less visible dynamics subtending Italian American contributions to Nola from the early colonial period through today. The four papers in this session draw on the several cultural institutions, artifacts, and local histories of Italian Americans. They examine theatrical productions, artworks, businesses, and community centers created by and for Italian Americans in New Orleans.
In addition, this panel addresses the convention’s theme of “visibility” by deliberately connecting some obvious and some less obvious Italian American influences in the city. The panelists challenge the accepted cultural histories and the standard narratives of Italian immigration to the region. Until recently, for example, Italian American Studies framed much of its visible history through the contours of the mass migration era (1880-1900), when millions of Italians fled the newly established Italian nation– its regional hierarchies and exploitations–for the United States. New conversations in the field have expanded the scope of history, region, and ethnic affiliation to examine antebellum Italian migration, Italians in South and Central America, and Italian identifications with non-white communities.
Local histories in Nola have dilated around important, if well-trodden, narratives. Nystrom’s influential Creole Italian, for example, energized the field of food studies with attention to the dispersal of Sicilian migrant culinary cultures throughout Nola cuisine. Since then, the scope of Italian influences in the city’s cultural lives has only expanded. Alan Gravano addresses Nystrom’s call by proposing a cultural history of New Orleans’s most storied Italian-owned institutions. Instead of focusing on distinct individuals or their local traditions, Gravano envisions the Italian American life of Nola through its collective hospitality cultures from the 19th to the 21st century. Offering an alternative vision of what makes culture, Gianni Cicali investigates Italian set designers’ 18th- and 19th-century history. Though more famous for burlesque than Greek tragedies, Nola’s theater history is a complex tapestry of languages, traditions, genres, and social classes. Cicali seeks to situate famous early set designers in the larger life of Nola, using archival sources to explore these men’s relations to the enslaving economies and social hierarchies of their own time.
The other participants advance Cicali’s emphasis on the race dynamics between Italians and other citizens of New Orleans. George De Stefano’s study of “race, racism, and the forging of Italian American identity” in Nola reconstructs the way ethnic identity in the US is enacted and elaborated in response to existing systems of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. The re-evaluation of mass migration politics through the lens of white supremacy recasts the long-visible stories of Italian American abjection. Marcella Zulla analyzes racially-coded children’s relationships during the Southern Civil Rights movement. Using Jessica Jackson’s history of the Jim Crow era, oral histories, and archival research, Zulla reconstructs Italian American and African American history through southern children’s racial experiences. Moderator and respondent Sarah Salter will connect these diverse approaches to Nola’s sociocultural history by integrating her decades-long experience with 18th-21st-century archival and genealogical research.
By concentrating on the internal dynamism and diversity of Italian America through the context of New Orleans, the Italian American LLC proposes to re-encounter one of the US’s most global and cosmopolitan cities, making visible the permutations and perspectives of one of its founding communities.